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How to Segment Your Traffic to Increase Leads and Conversions

Whether you’re marketing an e-commerce site, an SaaS company, a blog, or a Fortune500 company, traffic segmentation has the potential to transform your lead generation results by delivering the right experience to the right person at the right time. (highlight to tweet)

Before I explain how to create personalized web journeys and marketing funnels for your audience buckets, let’s first establish why segmentation matters.

Imagine you’re looking at the Google Analytics report for your website’s homepage. You probably see a number of page views. Now imagine your page views as real people standing in a large room. You can probably see a mixture of people: good clients, bad clients, high-paying clients, low-paying clients, and people in various industries with different roles and interests.

People on your website have varying needs. Despite this, most websites send all visitors through the same one-size-fits-all path. But why, when traffic segmentation can generate an 89 percent sales uplift and 58 percent increase in average order value?

If you’re anything like me, you might be thinking, “This sounds great, but where’s the evidence to suggest it’ll actually grow our company?”

In 2015, my team added traffic segmentation to MusicLawContracts.com, an e-commerce site that provides music contract templates. We added a form on the homepage that required visitors to answer, “Im a _, looking to _.” (e.g. “I’m a record label looking to sign an artist.”) When they hit “Find my contract,” they were redirected to a personalized landing page recommending the most relevant product based on their responses.

Instead of taking an average of 20 minutes to buy a product on this site, it took under six minutes. The site’s conversion rate increased from 1.31 percent to 2.47 percent (an 89 percent increase in sales), and people were spending $110.50 on average instead of $70.89.

In other words, segmentation improved the site’s conversion rate, average order value, and the time it took for someone to find and purchase a product. How? By making it easier and faster to get different visitors to the right product for them.

By knowing two pieces of information (who they were and what they wanted), we could also personalize all of our email marketing campaigns to be more relevant to their specific situation. We could now show the right message to the right person.

So, how can you apply this to your website to improve your marketing metrics?

There are several methods you can use to segment your visitors into different “buckets.” We’ve already seen how you can use a form tool to segment people into different buckets. This is my preferred approach, as it provides an engaging experience for visitors, while enabling you to capture leads in your CRM and create valuable reports to better understand your audience.

There are other methods like using cookies to dynamically track and “swap out” content on your site, but as this approach typically requires complex software to manage, I’d recommend starting off by segmenting visitors using a basic form.

One technique that has become quite popular is having a tool or form on your homepage that sends visitors down a personalized path when submitted. This is the approach that we use for Leadformly’s homepage. As you can see below, we have a form that asks visitors to describe their company. Based on their answer, they’re directed to a personalized “Thank You” page with a demo video that’s personalized to their type of business.

In addition to providing a more relevant experience to visitors, we’re also able to see what percentage of our visitors are enterprise companies, agencies, SMBs, and startups each month. We can even break this down by traffic source to see precisely where high-value enterprise leads are coming from, so that we can take the guesswork out of which channels we should focus on for lead generation.